Month: September 2012

I spent yesterday afternoon hanging out with church planters. I was reminded that the business of church should never–ever–become more important than the mission.

In my context this means that every new initiative and idea must pass through the mission filter. At Restore, we keep it simple. Does X proposal, idea, innovation, piece of gear etc. ultimately help people find their way back to God? If the answer is yes, then it’s on the table. If it doesn’t, we toss it out with the trash.

So you get a call from one of your key leaders, someone who is passionate about Jesus and serving others. She tells you that she’s entering a new season in her career and needs to step back from leadership for awhile. This is someone who has had a great impact on the people around her. She will be missed.

What do you do? Celebrate of course! That’s right. Celebrate. Because leadership happens in seasons.

Simply celebrate all of the great things that the leader accomplished. Sure, we will miss all of her gifts and abilities, but God has done something through her and so celebrate.

It’s OK for people serve in seasons. We church planters need to get our heads around the fact that people will come and go. And when a leader says their season is over, don’t take it personally–don’t fret. Celebrate all that God has done through the leader and trust that God will provide new leadership for the next season.

We don’t have a communication specialist at Restore. But our team appreciates how important it is to communicate well. So I meet with some of our staff once a week to talk about communications.

The first thing we do is review last week’s assignments. We ask a simple question: How effective were we last week in communicating what we wanted? Accountability is key. Doing what you say you’re going to do when you said you would do it is essential.

Next we talk about what we need to do this week. We ask ourselves some simple questions:

What is the ONE thing we are trying to communicate this week and why?

What conversation are we trying to start via our social media outlets and why?

What content needs to be removed to maintain clarity of our message?

Oh–and last but not least, we ask for everyone’s last 5%. What is it you want to say or do that we haven’t addressed? This way everyone leaves the meeting feeling that they’ve been heard and team doesn’t miss anything important that needs to be communicated.

What about your church? Who handles communications? How have you structured your team to handle the various tasks? How do you know people are getting the message?

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The average church planter is dealing with a ton of stuff like: team building, leadership issues, facility challenges, and finances to name just a few. It’s probably too much. After all, the more I talk to planters the more I am convinced many of them overestimate their own abilities to lead all of these well.

I am convinced that a planter needs to keep the gospel the main thing. That’s what MissionGlue is going to be all about: helping planters navigate the details of church planting so they can keep the gospel the main thing.

This needs to be a conversation and so I invite you into it. If you’re a church planter or on a launch team I want to hear from you.